Let’s talk religious women, nuns, sisters. Changes in religious life were, after liturgical changes and the end of Friday abstinence, the most visible manifestations of whatever it was that was going on, I’d say. As always, I’ll start by sharing my own experiences and invite you to share your own.
I grew up in the 1980s and had three main exposures to religious sisters before I went off to a Catholic college.
First, I went to a Catholic grade school. When I started, there were only two sisters left teaching there, one in 4th grade and one in 8th grade. By the time I reached 4th grade they were already gone. I remember being told by other kids that they were strict--particularly the 4th grade teacher--but I definitely remember cheerfulness and kindness. In hindsight, I suspect that the accusation of strictness was because they expected students to do homework and behave themselves in class! They did not wear habits, but I have an impression of black-and-white outfits and long skirts rather than slacks.
Secondly, my family would visit downtown Chicago a couple of times a year, and we would always stop by the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore. As a Catholic child who loved to read, it was always a treat. They had a little adoration chapel in the back where we could pray as well. I don't remember the sisters themselves all that much, other than a kind and steady presence, and helpful in providing book recommendations.
Finally, there was Mother Teresa. She and Pope John Paul II were the two Catholic giants--and now saints--of my childhood. Mother Teresa was a celebrity, a household name. Everyone knew of her as a living saint. My knowledge of Mother Teresa came mostly from the news and from my mother (herself a Slavic Catholic). I think my Catholic grade school took us all to see a documentary about her at the local art theater at one point. But even by that remote example, I think Mother Teresa formed my impression of what the active religious life aspires to be--to be Christ to the poor. And honestly, her own radical poverty and selflessness scared and intimidated me!
I still remember coming home from school one day to learn that Princess Diana had died--and that Mother Teresa had also slipped away quietly, as if God had allowed her to come home unnoticed in the shadow of that high-profile clamor and grief.
One of the experiences that shaped me in terms of the Church was meeting the Maryknoll missionary Sr Janice McLaughlin as a schoolgirl in the late 1970s in the Eastern Highlands of what is now Zimbabwe. At that time, the war against the white Smith government was very Intense and all of us were afraid of what would happen to our classmates and those fighting a guerilla war in the countryside. Like many of the Catholic missionary orders and as a member of the Catholic Justice & Peace Commission, she resisted human-rights violations by the government and was deported after being locked up in solitary confinement for 18 days and sentenced to seven years in prison, a sentence protested by the US. We went to say good bye to her at the airport. She kept vey calm and smiled and talked to us vey quietly but we could see from the bruises on he face and her stiff movements that she had been beaten and probably tortured. That calm smiling courage was something that made me realise what religious life or simply a life of faith could mean.
After independence, Sr Janice returned to Zimbabwe and I came to know her as an adult, someone very much at home in Harare and committed to service and nurturing the love of God in broken communities. She was so deeply loved and influenced so many.
I went all through Catholic elementary and high schools, graduating from high school in 1967. In elementary school, we were taught by Sisters of Mercy. At that time, they were still wearing the full habit. I think that changed when I was in college, according to my younger siblings who were still going to school there. Most of the sisters were wonderful women who clearly loved teaching. One of the unfortunate exceptions was my eighth grade teacher, a sarcastic and passive aggressive woman. I remember envying a classmate who had appendicitis, because she at least had a break from our teacher for a couple of weeks!! I even briefly prayed for appendicitis! I rarely told my parents any of the unpleasant things that happened at school.
In high school we had the Missionary Sisters of the Mother of God in my all-girl school. Since they were a a Ukrainian order, there were a lot of cultural differences between them and most of the students. Their novitiate was also there, and some of the novices were high school students. As I remember it, some of the novices were high school grads who were taking high school classes that they needed to take before applying to college. Conversing with the novices was discouraged, so even though we were in school with them (it was a very small school) we never really got to know them. The school had boarding students and day students. I was a day student. I think the boarders did get to know the young novices to a certain extent. Of course, the habits worn by the sisters were quite old-fashioned. I recently started following them on Facebook. The high school no longer exists. The habits look pretty much the same as they were in the sixties. The order has dwindled down to fewer than two dozen sisters, from what I could tell.
In my Catholic university that I transferred to from a state college after my sophomore year, I had classmates who were members of different religious communities. Some of the young women wore habits, and some wore ordinary clothing. Throughout my life I’ve had female friends who were religious sisters. Almost without exception, the women who started out religious life wearing habits and then switched over to “regular” clothing did not miss wearing the religious habits. Personally, I don’t care what clothing they wear, although I do think they should at least wear a distinctive cross, identifying them as a member of a religious community.
Not my experience, but my great grandmother's. She was the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. When her mother was diagnosed with TB, her father placed her in an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity at a very young age, and she lived with them until she was 18. I don't know specifics, but the family story is that it was a hellhole and she was subject to some pretty serious abuse, in part because she was Italian (dark Sicilian Italian at that) and that wasn't a popular thing to be at the time in America even among Catholics. This would have been in the 1920s and 1930s.
My experiences in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty diverse. I knew two habit-less parish RE directors at different parishes who ran a tight ship. One of them quizzed me to see if I was ready for first communion...mom wanted me to do it apart from my CCD class, I forget why. I remember the questions being pretty orthodox.
I remember a story about the second one being pretty high up in the diocese chain of command pushing hard against the new safe environment rules and background checks-- until the results from the checks started coming in and she saw how many people applying had past histories of sexual assault.
The rest were habited and from a couple different orders(the Dominican Filipino nun who made my eighth grade class do the chicken dance comes to mind, as does the principal of the school, another Dominican sister, who became obsessed with having us practice the school Christmas musical to the point that our academics suffered).
I started school in 1959 and had a truly psychotic nun for the first grade. She was extremely abusive and came within inches of murdering me. She also got caught by the principal abusing me. At Christmas she disappeared, and my Mom required me to write her a letter telling her I was sorry she was gone. It was a total lie. I read her obituary many years later and it said she was there 2 years rather than 4 months. I presume those missing years were spent in an insane asylum. The order changed her name and never allowed her to teach In a school again. We were her one and only such experiment. I think nowadays they have psychiatric evaluations before they allow people into religious life.
Her successor had blue eyes like the first one and since they wore the same habit I ended merging them into one bad person. As an adult the second one and I became friends and she was horrified to learn what I and others had undergone at the hands of her predecessor at my two room school. So she wasn't told what her students had gone through, and my parents knew about very little of the abuse I went through. The sisters stopped wearing bonnets around third or fourth grade and wore a simple head band and veil instead. Our teacher told us it was much easier because the bonnets had to be starched to keep their shape and were a lot of work.
They kept those new habits until sometime when I was in high school. Our French teacher told us that the hardest thing for her once they changed was remembering not to lift her skirt when she was going up and down stairs because it was no longer a tripping hazard.
My home parish in the mid-80's had a "pastoral assistant" who was a nun from one of those orders that modernized overnight at VII - Visitation Sisters maybe? While theologically out in left field, she was very good at her job - the parish was never administered with such organization and attention to detail ever again after she left. For instance, she always arranged the nicest, most thoughtful thank-you gifts for choir-members, etc., every Christas and Easter. As a child I was taught to view her with scorn and suspicion for her liberal Catholicism, but she was very kind to me when I got mocked and ostracized by the youth leaders at my Confirmation retreat for insisting that yes, Jesus did in fact know who he was. In retrospect, I see Sister L. as a bit of a tragic figure: in her earlier years at the parish, she dressed in sober black and white outfits as a sort of self-imposed semi-habit, but gradually moved toward more fashionable and feminine garb through the years. She lived alone in an apartment and was no doubt greatly underpaid compared to any administrator of her talents in the secular world. It seems likely that for a while she believed the Church would start ordaining women like her, but in the end, her role was not much different from the put-upon, overworked, more or less unpaid sisters of yesteryear who cleaned the rectories and kept the parochial schools running. Eventually, she took a "sabbatical" to go care for a dying aunt; next thing we heard, a year or so later, she had married her uncle-by-marriage after the aunt's death. Can't really blame her; as an ex-nun my husband knew, from the same period, put it: I didn't sign up so I could work in an office and wear pant-suits and live alone in a studio apartment, the hell with that - I'm going to go get married!
I grew up as a Protestant and didn't convert until 1990. I read about nuns in history books and in fiction but I don't think I realized that they still existed until about 1980, which was the year I graduated from high school. Pope John Paul II came to Anchorage, Alaska where I was going to junior college, and around the same time Mother Teresa had hit the news in a big way even in non Catholic circles. She had recently received the Nobel Peace Prize. My parents were quite impressed with her since they had visited India and seen the misery there at the time.
Since I was discerning at the time, I actually spent some time thinking about going to India and joining her order. At a very young 18 I am not sure I had a good sense of how that would work for a non Catholic!
I do think that encountering two such Catholics as JP2 and Mother Teresa, even remotely, made a difference in my conversion story. Their witness made up for a lot of the mediocrity and even misinformation that you've discussed which I occasionally encountered going to mass and RCIA in the late 80's.
Thanks for this project. I read all the updates but since I wasn't a Catholic growing up I don't usually have a contribution.
I grew up in the 1980s and had three main exposures to religious sisters before I went off to a Catholic college.
First, I went to a Catholic grade school. When I started, there were only two sisters left teaching there, one in 4th grade and one in 8th grade. By the time I reached 4th grade they were already gone. I remember being told by other kids that they were strict--particularly the 4th grade teacher--but I definitely remember cheerfulness and kindness. In hindsight, I suspect that the accusation of strictness was because they expected students to do homework and behave themselves in class! They did not wear habits, but I have an impression of black-and-white outfits and long skirts rather than slacks.
Secondly, my family would visit downtown Chicago a couple of times a year, and we would always stop by the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore. As a Catholic child who loved to read, it was always a treat. They had a little adoration chapel in the back where we could pray as well. I don't remember the sisters themselves all that much, other than a kind and steady presence, and helpful in providing book recommendations.
Finally, there was Mother Teresa. She and Pope John Paul II were the two Catholic giants--and now saints--of my childhood. Mother Teresa was a celebrity, a household name. Everyone knew of her as a living saint. My knowledge of Mother Teresa came mostly from the news and from my mother (herself a Slavic Catholic). I think my Catholic grade school took us all to see a documentary about her at the local art theater at one point. But even by that remote example, I think Mother Teresa formed my impression of what the active religious life aspires to be--to be Christ to the poor. And honestly, her own radical poverty and selflessness scared and intimidated me!
I still remember coming home from school one day to learn that Princess Diana had died--and that Mother Teresa had also slipped away quietly, as if God had allowed her to come home unnoticed in the shadow of that high-profile clamor and grief.
One of the experiences that shaped me in terms of the Church was meeting the Maryknoll missionary Sr Janice McLaughlin as a schoolgirl in the late 1970s in the Eastern Highlands of what is now Zimbabwe. At that time, the war against the white Smith government was very Intense and all of us were afraid of what would happen to our classmates and those fighting a guerilla war in the countryside. Like many of the Catholic missionary orders and as a member of the Catholic Justice & Peace Commission, she resisted human-rights violations by the government and was deported after being locked up in solitary confinement for 18 days and sentenced to seven years in prison, a sentence protested by the US. We went to say good bye to her at the airport. She kept vey calm and smiled and talked to us vey quietly but we could see from the bruises on he face and her stiff movements that she had been beaten and probably tortured. That calm smiling courage was something that made me realise what religious life or simply a life of faith could mean.
After independence, Sr Janice returned to Zimbabwe and I came to know her as an adult, someone very much at home in Harare and committed to service and nurturing the love of God in broken communities. She was so deeply loved and influenced so many.
Thanks for the opportunity to share.
Mary
I went all through Catholic elementary and high schools, graduating from high school in 1967. In elementary school, we were taught by Sisters of Mercy. At that time, they were still wearing the full habit. I think that changed when I was in college, according to my younger siblings who were still going to school there. Most of the sisters were wonderful women who clearly loved teaching. One of the unfortunate exceptions was my eighth grade teacher, a sarcastic and passive aggressive woman. I remember envying a classmate who had appendicitis, because she at least had a break from our teacher for a couple of weeks!! I even briefly prayed for appendicitis! I rarely told my parents any of the unpleasant things that happened at school.
In high school we had the Missionary Sisters of the Mother of God in my all-girl school. Since they were a a Ukrainian order, there were a lot of cultural differences between them and most of the students. Their novitiate was also there, and some of the novices were high school students. As I remember it, some of the novices were high school grads who were taking high school classes that they needed to take before applying to college. Conversing with the novices was discouraged, so even though we were in school with them (it was a very small school) we never really got to know them. The school had boarding students and day students. I was a day student. I think the boarders did get to know the young novices to a certain extent. Of course, the habits worn by the sisters were quite old-fashioned. I recently started following them on Facebook. The high school no longer exists. The habits look pretty much the same as they were in the sixties. The order has dwindled down to fewer than two dozen sisters, from what I could tell.
In my Catholic university that I transferred to from a state college after my sophomore year, I had classmates who were members of different religious communities. Some of the young women wore habits, and some wore ordinary clothing. Throughout my life I’ve had female friends who were religious sisters. Almost without exception, the women who started out religious life wearing habits and then switched over to “regular” clothing did not miss wearing the religious habits. Personally, I don’t care what clothing they wear, although I do think they should at least wear a distinctive cross, identifying them as a member of a religious community.
Not my experience, but my great grandmother's. She was the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. When her mother was diagnosed with TB, her father placed her in an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity at a very young age, and she lived with them until she was 18. I don't know specifics, but the family story is that it was a hellhole and she was subject to some pretty serious abuse, in part because she was Italian (dark Sicilian Italian at that) and that wasn't a popular thing to be at the time in America even among Catholics. This would have been in the 1920s and 1930s.
My experiences in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty diverse. I knew two habit-less parish RE directors at different parishes who ran a tight ship. One of them quizzed me to see if I was ready for first communion...mom wanted me to do it apart from my CCD class, I forget why. I remember the questions being pretty orthodox.
I remember a story about the second one being pretty high up in the diocese chain of command pushing hard against the new safe environment rules and background checks-- until the results from the checks started coming in and she saw how many people applying had past histories of sexual assault.
The rest were habited and from a couple different orders(the Dominican Filipino nun who made my eighth grade class do the chicken dance comes to mind, as does the principal of the school, another Dominican sister, who became obsessed with having us practice the school Christmas musical to the point that our academics suffered).
I started school in 1959 and had a truly psychotic nun for the first grade. She was extremely abusive and came within inches of murdering me. She also got caught by the principal abusing me. At Christmas she disappeared, and my Mom required me to write her a letter telling her I was sorry she was gone. It was a total lie. I read her obituary many years later and it said she was there 2 years rather than 4 months. I presume those missing years were spent in an insane asylum. The order changed her name and never allowed her to teach In a school again. We were her one and only such experiment. I think nowadays they have psychiatric evaluations before they allow people into religious life.
Her successor had blue eyes like the first one and since they wore the same habit I ended merging them into one bad person. As an adult the second one and I became friends and she was horrified to learn what I and others had undergone at the hands of her predecessor at my two room school. So she wasn't told what her students had gone through, and my parents knew about very little of the abuse I went through. The sisters stopped wearing bonnets around third or fourth grade and wore a simple head band and veil instead. Our teacher told us it was much easier because the bonnets had to be starched to keep their shape and were a lot of work.
They kept those new habits until sometime when I was in high school. Our French teacher told us that the hardest thing for her once they changed was remembering not to lift her skirt when she was going up and down stairs because it was no longer a tripping hazard.
My home parish in the mid-80's had a "pastoral assistant" who was a nun from one of those orders that modernized overnight at VII - Visitation Sisters maybe? While theologically out in left field, she was very good at her job - the parish was never administered with such organization and attention to detail ever again after she left. For instance, she always arranged the nicest, most thoughtful thank-you gifts for choir-members, etc., every Christas and Easter. As a child I was taught to view her with scorn and suspicion for her liberal Catholicism, but she was very kind to me when I got mocked and ostracized by the youth leaders at my Confirmation retreat for insisting that yes, Jesus did in fact know who he was. In retrospect, I see Sister L. as a bit of a tragic figure: in her earlier years at the parish, she dressed in sober black and white outfits as a sort of self-imposed semi-habit, but gradually moved toward more fashionable and feminine garb through the years. She lived alone in an apartment and was no doubt greatly underpaid compared to any administrator of her talents in the secular world. It seems likely that for a while she believed the Church would start ordaining women like her, but in the end, her role was not much different from the put-upon, overworked, more or less unpaid sisters of yesteryear who cleaned the rectories and kept the parochial schools running. Eventually, she took a "sabbatical" to go care for a dying aunt; next thing we heard, a year or so later, she had married her uncle-by-marriage after the aunt's death. Can't really blame her; as an ex-nun my husband knew, from the same period, put it: I didn't sign up so I could work in an office and wear pant-suits and live alone in a studio apartment, the hell with that - I'm going to go get married!
I grew up as a Protestant and didn't convert until 1990. I read about nuns in history books and in fiction but I don't think I realized that they still existed until about 1980, which was the year I graduated from high school. Pope John Paul II came to Anchorage, Alaska where I was going to junior college, and around the same time Mother Teresa had hit the news in a big way even in non Catholic circles. She had recently received the Nobel Peace Prize. My parents were quite impressed with her since they had visited India and seen the misery there at the time.
Since I was discerning at the time, I actually spent some time thinking about going to India and joining her order. At a very young 18 I am not sure I had a good sense of how that would work for a non Catholic!
I do think that encountering two such Catholics as JP2 and Mother Teresa, even remotely, made a difference in my conversion story. Their witness made up for a lot of the mediocrity and even misinformation that you've discussed which I occasionally encountered going to mass and RCIA in the late 80's.
Thanks for this project. I read all the updates but since I wasn't a Catholic growing up I don't usually have a contribution.